Mitochondrial Mission Creep and the Cloning Connection

Shoukhrat Mitalipov

On Tuesday, February 3, the UK House of Commons voted in favor of legalizing nuclear transfer to avoid some mitochondrial diseases. The British press headlined it the next day, and the rest of the world’s media then caught on that this was a Very Big Deal. The AP report noted that:

While this legislation was drafted specifically to grant permission only for certain specified techniques, critics fear it will encourage scientists to push for other experiments in the future.

No, no, said supporters on both sides of the pond. “This is not a slippery slope,” UK Public Health Minister Jane Ellison insisted. Susan Solomon of the New York Stem Cell Foundation agreed. Bioethicist Arthur Caplan also discounted worries about the slippery slope. So did the MP Frank Dobson, in the Commons debate.

Really? We didn’t have to wait a week.

On Sunday, February 8, British newspapers reported that Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), who pioneered a variation of the techniques in question, had asked the FDA for permission to start clinical trials of it in order to treat age-related infertility. This concept is not new: It was part of the FDA discussions in February 2014, critiqued and dismissed, and discussed again last summer. Nor is it a surprise that Mitalipov applied, though this may be the first public announcement.

Here’s the fun part (#1): Mitalipov told The Independent that “We hope [the UK vote] will help in the US, and hopefully the FDA will move faster.” In response, said the UK Telegraph:

if the technology was made available to infertile women in America, there would be growing pressure for Britain to follow, experts said.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by these authors and blogs are theirs and do not necessarily represent that of the Bioethics Research Library and Kennedy Institute of Ethics or Georgetown University.